Ask the Audience

I'm the only person in my street who doesn't have a television licence,
doesn't have a television, doesn't have a Brothercam in every room. I'm
told they give furtive net-curtain shots of houses without cameras, every
couple of hours, for a bit of a comic relief, a bit of viewer conformity
reassurance, a bit of an excuse to bring out the placards and the petrol
bombs. After all, these people must be hiding something, mustn't they?

Television licences cover the cost of the cameras, thanks to one of the
earlier referenda, whether you choose to have them fitted or not. I did
have a box of Brothercams up in the loft, but they kept sending distress
calls to the receptor vans, and I got fed up of having to explain myself.
They're at the bottom of a municipal pond, now, watching the shopping
trolleys rust. They traced them and found me and fined me, but it seemed
worth it at the time.

Streetlight cameras pan and scan as I cross the promenade, one of them
noticing me and announcing to its immediate neighbours that it will track
me out of sight, whoever I am. Its bright orange casing glints as it turns
in the rain - this is ostensibly a police camera rather than a Big Brother
camera, but they all run the same software, all feed into the same
network. The orange cameras are for public safety, for the observation and
capture of the criminal element. The blue cameras are television cameras,
giving entertainment to the world, and glittering prizes to those lucky
enough to be caught on them. Blue cameras in the comfort of people's own
homes, in the pubs and clubs, in the shopping malls. Orange cameras above
the streets, the alleyways, the undesirable wastelands. Stay in shot,
viewers.

A helicopter rises in the grey sky above the hotels and thrums out over
the beach, its spotlight swinging beneath it like a slow pendulum, a
circle of white arcing across the sand and the water. It's just for show;
they'll have seen me on the infra-red, if it's me they're looking for, if
it's me that's been voted out. I give them a wave. As if to respond, the
spotlight turns to envelop me, the helicopter wheeling in place to hover
solidly above the ocean.

I'm told that my face appears on the Big Brother Eviction Channel, every
so often; perhaps it's there now. Now that all the paedophiles and
terrorists and asylum-seekers have gone, it's just the luck of the draw
with random data profiling. I was careless enough to buy a few books of
gay-interest literature through Amazon, a few years ago, and that was
enough to set the "gay" flag on my identity profile, enough to get
automatic eviction votes from a fair percentage of the electorate. I've
posted my PGP key on newsgroups a few times, which means that I "use
cryptography". I "give no money to charity", I "don't read tabloid
newspapers", I am "unmarried", I "have no children". It's all there.

And the spotlight is still on me. Perhaps I've not been voted out yet,
perhaps I'm on camera, on captioned screens across the city, one of the
six unlucky contestants on the Eviction Channel. Half a dozen local faces
every half hour, the concerned voiceover reading out any profile factors
scoring less than eight per cent, give or take.

Jane is a lesbian cryptographer with a record of vandalising Brothercams.
Mortimer is in the 95-100 age group, and voted "no" in the referendum to
bomb Cairo. David is vegetarian, and runs a Nazi paraphernalia mail-order
Web site. Christopher has a manic-depressive disorder, and watched the
whole of last week's retroactively-banned spoof documentary. Irini is a
homeless methadone addict with variant-three CJD. Daniel's wife and
daughter were brutally abused and murdered five years ago, no arrests were
ever made, and he's living on your street.